The tiger king

A historian examines the archival record and the speculative inner life of Tipu Sultan.

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Arshia Sattar

August 4, 2016

ISSUE DATE: August 15, 2016

UPDATED: August 5, 2016 11:58 IST

Illustration by Anirban Ghosh

If you live outside southern India, it's likely that Tipu Sultan was a single chapter in your history book where he appeared as a regional satrap with ideas well beyond his station, a man who indulged in rose gardens and silk worms and whose betrayal by the Maratha Confederacy was a mere footnote in the early battles against the British, as they went from being a trading company to an occupying force. You may be forgiven for thinking that Tipu was just that fellow with a magnificent moustache whose favourite toy was a mechanical tiger tearing out the throat of a British soldier. And, yes, recently someone brought his sword back from England. But in the south, Tipu is a real and insistent presence-his ghost haunts Karnataka, appearing at regular, if infrequent, intervals. We're not sure what to do with this local warrior, this sometimes son of soil, sometimes alien oppressor. You can receive death threats from neighbouring Maharashtra if you suggest that, like Shivaji, Tipu fought 'outsiders' in the name of his own people. If you call for a commemoration of his birthday, a Tipu Jayanti in Karnataka, riots break out among people whose ancestors he killed. You can't even name Bengaluru's international airport after him, even though Tipu was born in the village, Devanahalli, where the airport now sits.

It is clear that many of the problems pertaining to honouring Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore, have to do with the fact that he is Muslim. In these times, it is impossible to think of someone like him as an incipient 'freedom fighter', one who saw the dark horizon of colonialism and tried to build local alliances to protect the autonomous kingdoms in the region. There is a long tradition of critical assessment that demonises Tipu as an upstart usurper of the Wodeyar throne, an opportunist who signed a treaty with the French against the British, a vicious tormentor of his enemies, particularly non-Muslims. Equally, such popular dramatised histories as Praxy Fernandes's The Tigers of Mysore, Bhagwan Gidwani's The Sword of Tipu Sultan (the basis for Sanjay Khan's television serial of the same name broadcast on Doordarshan in 1990) and Girish Karnad's play The Dreams of Tipu Sultan have sought to present him as a humane and far-sighted monarch and, in doing so, have reached for the man behind the Tiger.

Recently, though, more and more historians are leaning towards the idea that Tipu might well have been a visionary in more ways than one-politically, economically and perhaps even socially. Certainly, his sense of a world beyond the subcontinent and how it might serve his ambitions is being noted. Historian Kate Brittlebank's Tiger fits snugly into this category of reassessment. She starts by reminding us how Tipu was seen by the British in the 18th century-as a savage barbarian who took pleasure in torturing and killing his English prisoners, "the most feared Indian of his times". This was a necessary part of the depiction of other races and cultures at the time, building up to the dehumanisation of Oriental and African peoples from which the colonial project drew its moral authority. Brittlebank also wants us to see Tipu as a product of this period-as righteous or cruel as any other contemporaneous ruler might have been. But despite this seeming even-handedness of perspective, it is clear that she carries a torch for Tipu. She, too, seeks the father, the husband, the son not perceptible in court and private documents, but from what we know about human beings and how they behave in adversity as well as times of triumph. This is an interesting position for a historian to take, combining so-called facts with emotional and psychological information derived from our own experiences.

To that end, it is disappointing that Brittlebank deals with possibly the most shattering moment in Tipu's public and private life-the handing over of his young sons as hostages to the British until he could pay war reparations-in a scant few lines. As a father, his heart must have broken at this parting and as a monarch, what could be more humiliating than this separation from his sons? Brittlebank offers sympathy for the father that Tipu was but does not speculate further about how this moment might have affected Tipu the monarch's behaviour, his later motivations and how the incident might have determined his later actions.

As Karnad did in The Dreams of Tipu Sultan, Brittlebank mines an extraordinary document of the king's recorded dreams, which gives anyone who cared to decipher it centuries later a chance to glimpse what his anxieties and fears might have been through the meaning of his dream images. Here, Brittlebank speculates more freely and parses one of Tipu's dreams in which a man, with whom the king has been bantering, turns into an attractive bare-breasted woman. She reads this to indicate Tipu's own love for women and his tendency to be flirtatious and light-hearted with them as against a more callous and brutal attitude believed to have prevailed during his lifetime. Brittlebank's general conclusion is that these recorded dreams (from the last few years of Tipu's life) were intended as aids to the magical and superstitious practices that Tipu believed would ensure his victory over the British.

In the end, though, I must say, it is an odd book. It is short, with appendices and references at a concise 163 pages of text. It tells us nothing more and nothing new about Tipu. For those who know little about him, this book is not enough, and for those who know something, the book is unsatisfying. Having said that, I was utterly delighted that Brittlebank led me to the metonymic (and startlingly modern, in that sense) nature of Tipu's babri, the tiger stripe that emblazoned his clothing, his banners and eventually his mausoleum. The single bold slash gestures towards the whole animal and, further still, to Tipu himself. What a graceful and effective shorthand to stamp both fear and authority.

Nonetheless, I have to wonder whether the length of the book and its survey/round-up tenor has something to do with Juggernaut's commitment to their app, which encourages one to read on their phone rather than in print. For me, this implies a nod of approval to shorter, punchier reads, rather than to expansive works which can be read slowly. Unexpectedly for a book such as this, the volume contains a few lushly reproduced images. These may reflect the drive towards the app, contributing to a rich digital read. But like the text itself, what we see in the images is entirely standard and well-known, adding nothing either to depictions of Tipu and his life or to our knowledge of the marvellous objects that were looted from his fort and palace after he was killed.

I suppose one could see Tiger as a ready reckoner on Tipu Sultan. It has information, context, a stated position, all of which are good things. Certainly, Brittlebank's research and knowledge cannot be faulted. If you like your history in little bites, this book is for you.